Posted tagged ‘applications’

Consumerization of IT has driven the corporate world into using more and more consumer-oriented devices. With that comes concerns around interoperability, support, and last, but not least, security. These devices have been a boon to employees and a bane to corporate IT. To me, trends like BYOD are revolutionary, and evolutionary solutions may not be the best match. Fortunately, there is hope on the horizon, and it’s coming from more than one area.

While watching television recently I came across two favorite programs from my youth. One was the cartoon The Jetsons. I really enjoyed the space-age technology and futuristic designs. The other was Star Trek (the original series). The idea of travelling around at warp speed and ‘beaming’ from one point to another was always fascinating to me. I realized that these advanced civilizations had at least one thing in common: they talked to their computers. No bulky keyboards, no awkward mice, no fancy trackballs, just good old-fashioned speech. And their computers not only listened, but they talked back, usually with good results.

Using speech to interact with your computer hasn’t really caught on. Other than converting speech to text, there are not too many business applications where you talk to your PC. With mobile technology, many of us have voice-dialed a name in our address book but not much else. And then Siri comes along.